PREFACE
My father’s plan of The Life of David Belasco was communicated, in detail, by him to me. He realized that whenever he might die he was certain to leave much work undone. He hoped and expected, however, to live long enough to complete this book. It was in his mind to the very end. The last entry in his “Journal” refers to it: “June. Saturday, 2. Cloudy and gloomy. Worked all day on the Memoir.” He spoke of it often during his agonized final illness. The last words he ever wrote are a part of it. I have, as well as I could, finished it for him, according to his plan, because I know that he wished me to do so.
This book was planned by Mr. Winter in 1913, as part of a comprehensive record of the American Stage which he purposed to write. Other kindred projects which he then had in view and on which he labored much include revised and augmented editions of his Life and Art of Edwin Booth and Life and Art of Joseph Jefferson; joint biographies of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, and an encyclopedical work to be called Alms for Oblivion, in which he intended to gather a vast mass of miscellaneous material relative to the Theatre. He also had in contemplation a Life of Augustin Daly, but he abandoned it because his friend the late Joseph Francis Daly (Augustin’s brother) had undertaken and in large part written a biography of that great theatrical manager and extraordinary man. All those projects languished because of lack of money: such books as those by William Winter issued since 1908 are, in every way, so costly to make that little commercial profit can be derived from them.
David Belasco, however, is the most conspicuous figure in the contemporary Theatre: his career has been long, picturesque, adventurous, and brilliant: “the present eye praises the present object,” and it was deemed certain that an authentic Life of that singular, romantic person would prove remunerative as well as interesting, instructive, and valuable. In September, 1913, accordingly,—soon after Mr. Winter’s The Wallet of Time had been brought out,—I was, as his agent, easily able to make for him very advantageous arrangements for the publication of such a work,—first to be passed through a prominent magazine, as a serial, and then to be issued in book form. Mr. Winter was much pleased and encouraged by this arrangement, and he had begun to gather and shape material for The Life of David Belasco when announcement was made that Mr. Belasco was writing and would presently publish, in Hearst’s Magazine, an Autobiography. My father had met with a similar experience in 1893, when Jefferson’s Autobiography, published as a serial in The Century, forestalled his authoritative Life of that great actor, rendering it, monetarily, almost profitless, and, therefore, he deemed it wise to lay aside this book.
Belasco’s The Story of My Life was published in Hearst’s Magazine, March, 1914, to December, 1915,—but, though it preëmpted the magazine field and made a work therein by my father impossible, it proved wholly inadequate and unreliable as a biography. In September, 1916, however,—soon after Shakespeare on the Stage—Third Series had been published,—Mr. Winter decided that the time was propitious for him to take up again the present Memoir, and, his publishers agreeing with him, he engaged to do so. He was then ill and weak; but he earnestly desired to work till the last, to be always doing, to overcome every obstacle by the force of his indomitable will, and, whatever he might suffer, never to yield or break under the pressure of adverse circumstance or the burden of age.
About the end of October, 1916, accordingly, he began the actual writing of this Memoir, and, although repeatedly urged by me to desist, he continued in it almost to the last day of his life. “I might better be dead,” he once exclaimed, “than to sit idle! I must go on: I must work at something: if it were not at this, it would be at something else. Moreover, I will not be beaten by anything: I will make this book the best thing of the kind I have ever yet done.”
If he had lived he would have done so; but his spirit was greater than his strength. When death came to him unconnected sections of this book, amounting to about three-fifths of the matter contained in Volume One and about one-third of that contained in Volume Two, were in type, awaiting his revision. Much of the remainder was in manuscript—some parts of it practically completed, some of it more or less roughly drafted. My task has been, substantially, to supply some dates, to fill some blanks, and to edit, coördinate, and join the material left by my father. That task I have performed with reverence and care, and if the errors and defects in this work—which I hope are few—be recognized as mine, and the merits and beauties in it—which I know to be many—be recognized as his, then the responsibility of authorship will be rightly divided.
Mr. Winter was of many moods,—and, when possible, he wrought at his writing as he felt inclined. That is the reason why some passages in this book which stand near to its close were finished and polished by him, while others, much earlier, were left incomplete or isolated. The subject of The Theatrical Syndicate, for example, was thoroughly familiar to him, and he wrote the section devoted to that subject in intervals of his restudy of “The Return of Peter Grimm,” a play about which he had written, for this book, little but rough notes when the end came (I have, herein, reprinted his criticism of that play previously recorded in another place). The last passage in the text on which he worked is that treating of “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” He brought the revised manuscript of that passage to me on the afternoon of June 2 and asked me to type it for him, saying: “I like the earnestness of it, and if you will make a fair copy for me I will go over it once more in the morning and dismiss it: I am too tired to go on to-day.” On June 3, 4, and 5, although suffering acutely, he insisted on rising, each day, and attempted to work, but was unable to do so. On the morning of June 5 he was forced to take to his bed. That was the beginning of the end.